It was before September 11, 2001, before the World Trade Center towers came down, before Al-Qaeda and Osama and the Taliban and IEDs and Kandahar and ramp ceremonies and the Highway of Heroes became part of a common language among Canadians that Adam West, an 18-year-old fresh out of high school, did what he had always wanted to do and joined the Canadian Army.

Both grandfathers fought in the Second World War. His mother’s Dad, James Marshall, a man he never met, was one “brave son-of-a-bitch” who came home with a chest full of medals. Forbes West, the grandfather he did know, came home and climbed the ranks to become a general.

Being a soldier was in the blood.

“I joined up and was naïve enough to think that I’d never have to go off to war, that maybe I’d do some peacekeeping,” says Captain Adam West, now 32, reflecting on his younger self from 14 years ago, while sitting at his desk at the Moss Park Armoury in Toronto.

“I remember taking the streetcar in those days and I had people call me a Fascist. Other people would say, ‘What’s with the uniform?’ I would tell them I was soldier in the Canadian Army. They’d say, ‘Canada has an army?’

“Afghanistan changed that. People come up to me now and say thank you.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced in March that May 9, 2014 would be a “National Day of Honour” commemorating Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan. There is a parade planned in Ottawa with a ceremony to follow on Parliament Hill. Speeches are to be made, a moment of silence observed.

“My thoughts are going to be similar to on a Remembrance Day,” Capt. West says. “Divided between the soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice; the soldiers I served with, especially the brave soldiers of my platoon; the people of Afghanistan and finally my family for the sacrifices they went through.

“Having said that, I don’t believe this day will make those thoughts overly special for me because there has not been a day since my deployment to Afghanistan where these thoughts have not been with me.”

And that is the big difference between Capt. Adam West and you and me, and most Canadians. We did not grow up wanting to be soldiers and we had never heard of Kandahar City, either, and we are presumably already half-forgetting about it now as Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan shifts from a current event to a chapter for the history books.

But the past for the 32-year-old career soldier remains palpable. He never forgets. The heat of Kandahar, that first blast of sun-baked air searing into his lungs as he stepped off a plane in August 2006 to begin a seven-month stint during some of the most dangerous days of the war, is just as real, just as present now as it was then.

He was 25. Trained, ready and within a matter of weeks he was standing in a valley when he heard a whistling noise, just like in an old war movie — a mortar dropping from the sky. It landed 30 feet from where he stood. Some rocks absorbed the blast. No rocks, no Capt. West still around today to talk about it.

Two days later he was in an RG 31 — picture an oversized truck with a gun turret on top — with four other men. It was morning. Hot. They were driving through downtown Kandahar, the sixth vehicle in a convoy. They passed a cross street. A station wagon was sitting there with its right turn signal on. It started to turn right then veered left. Somebody, the gunner, Corporal John Makela from Ottawa, saw what was happening before it happened and yelled — “IED! IED!” Then: boom. The RG 31’s tires burst, the windows shattered and the engine caught fire, as a cloud of dust engulfed everything. In the middle of it, the Canadians were checking their arms, yup, they were still attached, and their legs, yup, still attached, and saying, “Are you OK, are you OK?”

Miraculously, they all were.

Afterwards, when military intelligence interviewed the men for, well, paperwork, some would remember the station wagon as being grey, others said yellow and others said it was an SUV, and not a station wagon. Capt. West remembers it as being “charred black.”

“All that was left was a burned out chassis,” he says.

(Corporal Makela, the gunner, would later be wounded and awarded the Military Medal of Valour for subduing a second suicide car bomber — two weeks after the RG 31 was hit by the first.)

Nothing has ever made me prouder

Two days, two near misses, convinced Capt. West to change his MSN address to: gettingblownupsucks. “My girlfriend at the time didn’t think it was funny,” he says, explaining that to deal with the daily stress, the fear, you made light of the close scrapes. Or else you risked thinking too much about them. His 33-man platoon with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry was ambushed 18 times in seven months of escorting supply convoys around Kandahar Province. They all came home in one piece, more or less.

But then, 158 Canadian soldiers didn’t.

So was it worth it, expending all that Canadian blood and treasure? To answer, the captain tells me a story about what he remembers most about his Afghanistan experience. And it is not the getting blown up parts, but driving those roads and seeing all the kids, scrawny little Afghan urchins, poorer than dirt, sprinting across fields to watch the Canadians roll by.

Waving. Smiling. Happy. Kids.

“Nothing has ever made me prouder being a soldier, a Canadian — a human being — than seeing people who literally had nothing start to have something because of what we were doing there,” he says. “To be honest with you, the job we were doing was worth my life.”